Zvi Galil

Zvi Galil (Hebrew: צבי גליל‎; born 1947) is an Israeli computer scientist and mathematician. He served as the President of Tel Aviv University starting in 2007, but resigned in 2009. Galil is the former Dean of the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University as well as a professor there of engineering and computer science. His research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, computational complexity and cryptography.

His formal titles at Columbia included Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor of Engineering and Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Mathematical Methods and Computer Science. In 2009 he received the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates.

Zvi Galil was born in Tel Aviv, Israel. He completed both his B.Sc. (1970) and his M.Sc. (1971) in Applied Mathematics at Tel Aviv University before earning his Ph.D. at Cornell in 1975. He then spent a year working at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. From 1976 until 1995 he worked in the computer science department of Tel Aviv University, serving as its chair from 1979 to 1982. From 1982 on he also worked at Columbia, ending his association with Tel Aviv University only in 1995, when he was named to the deanship of the engineering school. In this position he has overseen the renaming of the school in honor of Chinese businessman Z. Y. Fu after a large donation was given in his name. In 1995, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, for "fundamental contributions to the design and analysis of algorithms and outstanding service to the theoretical computer science community," and in 2005 he was selected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published over 150 scientific papers and is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.

Preceded by David H. Auston

Dean of SEAS  1995 - 2007

Succeeded by Gerald Navratil